ALTERNATIVE USE OF MOTORCYCLE by Engr. A Taiwo

It was as if the organizer of this program read my mind when he was talking about the need for like minds to come together and not only that, when you have ideas you need a platform where you can actually share it before it can turn into reality.

I was at one time taking a look at Nigeria panoramically and I could see that we had a lot of motorcycles around us and that they’ve being constituting nuisance. Sometimes you see them with three, four passengers instead of one and off they into accidents.

There is a hospital in Ogbomoso that is very good in taking care of orthopaedics and that is Baptist Medical Centre. One out of every four patients you see in Baptist Medical Centre today is an orthopaedic problem probably brought in from a motorcycle accident. So I now thought, there is something for us to do around this area.

So way back in 2002, we set up a research to take a look at motorcycles-commercial motorcycle operation. Why is it that people are interested in it all of a sudden? We found out that looking at the profile of the people involved, they are not illiterates. They are people that have been in polytechnics, teachers training colleges who could not find any job anywhere and they just saw that they could live operating motorcycles commercially and off they went; and then we also found out that they had problems with the law because most of them got on motorcycles without passing any test. So they just pick up a motorcycle today; you have an uncle that is able to finance you and then he will give you a motorcycle, then you go!

So in order not to take much of your time, we went into action. There must be an alternative use. Unfortunately, I live in an area in Ogbomoso that is highly commercialised. So you see people lining up your drains (gutters) with refuse deliberately, pouring refuse right in front of you. I was alone protester until one time the local government people came around and they cleaned the gutter right from Taki (for those of you that know Ogbomoso) up to Federal Government college; and they did that about two, three years ago. We are still waiting for them this year.

So what am I trying to say? I’m beginning to think there is an alternative use for motorcycles. We could use motorcycles to actually clean refuse. So we decided to try and work with developing trailers, carts for motorcycles to pull.

We got into transporting of solid wastes from our cities to designated refuse dump; transporting of farm produce into market centres; generating electricity; tillage of agricultural land. Then, you can see motorcycles for crop processing, water pumping, mobile shops.

So that is the trailer developed in LAUTECH for use in clearing refuse from our cities and that is an example of motorcycle converted into tillage equipment. You can actually use it for ploughing by installing some device and there is another example of PTO UNIT. PTO actually means Power Take-off Unit. You need a device that will enable you to take power from the rear wheel of the motorcycle and then you use that mechanical power to drive other machines like the pepper grinder, like any kind of machine that you use on the farm or anywhere that will enable you to use it to generate electricity.

You were talking about power the other time, all you need do is to connect your generator to the PTO of the motorcycle, get your motorcycle working and then you have electricity once it is the right power. You know your generator will bring out power in ‘apparent power’- you understand what I’m saying? Because of induction and all those other factors. What you actually need is the watts. So electrical engineers will tell us you know, how to control that.

So we did some studies grinding 5kg of tomatoes, 5kg of pepper and tomatoes mixed together and trying to study how much time it took at every speed with gear one, gear two, gear three. You know we are limited in our university; we don’t have so much of these sophisticated equipments that you can actually use to measure the power but we made some-we improvised, and we were able to compare. At the end of the day, we out that the man that uses this will save about thirty percent of fuel consumption because you can control the speed; you can decide that you want to increase the speed; you can even decide on the size of motorcycle you want to use you know for little work that does not consume a lot of power like pepper grinder.

When you go to most of our villages now, you see that most of our so-called peasants-they call them peasants, I don’t believe they are peasants. The so-called peasants, each of them has motorcycles right now. So when they are on their farm working, they park this motorcycle and you see them going back to the age old crouching hoe and they start working with that; leaving a very valuable asset underneath the tree that could be used to make their work easier. You see their wives going into groups to go and fetch water, using the age-old stone to grind pepper and yet the husband has a motorcycle.

So we now thought of how can we help these people? Because we have sent out some questionnaires to some of these villages to pick up these facts. That was what gave birth to the idea of trying the PTO with the pepper grinder first and it really worked. That means; because there are really some villages I’m sure you will agree with me that we don’t have electricity in this country. They are not even on national grid. You are talking about electricity not being available in our cities, there are some places even if we don’t have electricity in our cities, they don’t have in their villages. So maybe they won’t have until the next fifty years and these are the people producing food for us, not people like you and me! If agriculture has problem today, I can go into teaching in the university, there are so many other things I can do but we have people that have no alternative and these are the people producing our food and this group of people don’t have a spokesman in Abuja to speak for them. So you see people going there to cheat them. They call them daruke people-these local people, “how much is your yam?” They buy at any price you know. So these are the people that are with the people we really want to help.

It is possible to tap mechanical power for useful work from the motorcycle. Any kind of chores that you do either on the farm or domestically, you can use the motorcycle. Remember the idea is: use what you have to get what you want.

You see so many of these motorcycles parked waiting for passengers, you know during the time they are waiting for passengers, why can’t they be put to work? You know somewhere to still generate money. By so doing, we’ll be de-populating our cities of this excessive number of motorcycles and sending them to where they are badly needed in our rural areas. At the end of the day, we’ll be contributing to reduction of accidents. We’ll be having lesser number of people moving around with limps. You see so many people around us in Nigeria now, so many people moving around with limps if we move close to them and find out why, they will tell you “I fell off from the motorcycle”. I saw so many of my students, what happened to your mouth? “I fell off from the motorcycle” you hear.

I believe there is a whole lot we can do with just the motorcycle.

Thank you.